1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a system and method for estimating an Internet-wide transmission path and transmission delay, and, more particularly, to a method of estimating an Internet-wide transmission path and transmission delay between two points on the Internet only using collected and disclosed actually measured data without requiring additional active actual Internet measurement.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, on the Internet, massive Internet applications and services that require close interaction between users distributed throughout the world have appeared. Representative examples of these services include Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), and Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs). These services require continuously updated information related to the variation in the internal performance of the Internet, that is, massive amounts of actually measured Internet data, in order to offer better services.
Measures of such performance evaluation include transmission delay, packet loss rate, effective bandwidth, and an IP hop count. Since the current Internet was implemented and started to be used before the concept of actual network performance measurement was firmly established, it does not externally reveal network-internal performance characteristics. Accordingly, various Internet infrastructures for actually measuring the performance of the Internet have been proposed. However, these systems are individually operated by operators who installed the corresponding systems, and are operated using different actual measurement mechanisms based on different performance evaluation measures.
Some systems are capable of processing data only offline. Because the actual measurement mechanisms of these actual measurement systems are very different from each other, it is difficult to share actual measurement data with other systems or reuse the data for other purposes. The reason for this is that existing actual Internet measurement infrastructures were designed without respect to compatibility or interoperability with current Internet services.
Accordingly, in order to offer higher quality services to users, current Internet applications employ their unique actual measurement systems for evaluating Internet performance and making decisions instead of utilizing existing systems. However, the cost that is required for the direct implementation, installation and operation of an individual unique actual measurement system is too high for Internet users or service developers to accept, or they are unable to pay such a cost. Since intermediate systems, such as firewalls or routers, sometimes block active Internet measurement packets (e.g., ICMP packets), there are cases where an attempt to implement such a system is impossible for Internet end users or application developers.
Accordingly, the technology for effectively providing actual Internet performance measurement data useful for various types of Internet applications is required.
The goals of the technology are (1) to enable planetary-scale or internet-wide queries about actual Internet performance measurement data to be performed (that is, enable queries to be performed between arbitrary hosts or nodes distributed throughout the Internet), (2) to enable the obtainment of values closest to actual measurement values expected by a querier when it is assumed that the querier can obtain results by directly performing actual measurement, (3) to enable the provision of sufficient and efficient answers to the extent of completely replacing an existing tendency of individual applications to implement and use their own actual measurement systems (the presentation of methodology in which the special and temporal costs for the processing of queries are optimized), and finally (4) to enable designing of an extendable system to control rapidly increasing actual measurement data and system users.